r wandered about the garden in the starlight, with their
ears full of those sounds of strange insects which, though they are
supposed to be, all over the world, a part of the magic of summer
nights, seemed to the Baroness to have beneath these western skies an
incomparable resonance.

Mr. Wentworth, though, as I say, he went punctiliously to call upon her,
was not able to feel that he was getting used to his niece. It taxed his
imagination to believe that she was really his half-sister's child. His
sister was a figure of his early years; she had been only twenty when
she went abroad, never to return, making in foreign parts a willful and
undesirable marriage. His aunt, Mrs. Whiteside, who had taken her to
Europe for the benefit of the tour, gave, on her return, so lamentable
an account of Mr. Adolphus Young, to whom the headstrong girl had united
her destiny, that it operated as a chill upon family feeling--especially
in the case of the half-brothers. Catherine had done nothing
subsequently to propitiate her family; she had not even written to
them in a way that indicated a lucid appreciation of their suspended
sympathy; so that it had become a tradition in Boston circles that the
highest charity, as regards this young lady, was to think it well to
forget her, and to abstain from conjecture as to the extent to which
her aberrations were reproduced in her descendants. Over these young
people--a vague report of their existence had come to his ears--Mr.
Wentworth had not, in the course of years, allowed his imagination to
hover. It had plenty of occupation nearer home, and though he had many
cares upon his conscience the idea that he had been an unnatural uncle
was, very properly, never among the number. Now that his nephew and
niece had come before him, he perceived that they were the fruit of
influences and circumstances very different from those under which his
own familiar progeny had reached a vaguely-qualified maturity. He felt
no provocation to say that these influences had been exerted for evil;
but he was sometimes afraid that he should not be able to like
his distinguished, delicate, lady-like niece. He was paralyzed and
bewildered by her foreignness. She spoke, somehow, a different language.
There was something strange in her words. He had a feeling that another
man, in his place, would accommodate himself to her tone; would ask
her questions and joke with her, reply to those pleasantries of her
own which someti